An Open Letter on Sharing the Blog of Burgher Jon

An Open Letter on Sharing the Blog of Burgher Jon

All bloggers go in to blogging for one reason or another. I’m in it (primarily) to help build a community around and gain exposure for the Pittsburgh Technology Scene. Don’t get me wrong, there are some tremendous side effects; getting the opportunity to talk about technology and Pittsburgh, network with some great people in both technology and Pittsburgh, inciting people to join a cause or try a piece of technology that they otherwise might not. In order to do any of these things though, we have to find the parts of the Pittsburgh and technology communities that want to engage. We need to build a community of them.

With very little effort to promote the blog, I have been excited by the amount of people that come through here everyday. The traffic, comments and emails have been so high in volume in these first couple months that I am encouraged about the possibilities for building a real community here. With that in mind, I’ve done a few things to encourage the growth of our community.

I have made it easier to share individual blog posts with your friends. At the bottom of each post (even in the RSS feed) there will be links so that you can share posts to a number of popular social networking sites. For now, I have selected the social networks I’m most familiar with (Digg, Dell.icio.us, Facebook, Google Reader, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo Buzz and Hacker News). If you use a different one and would like to share through it, let me know and I will add a button.

I have added contextual links down at the bottom of each post. These will be provided via Zemanta (a context service). In addition to providing you with resources that may well prove valuable, this will help search engines like Google understand what the blog post is about and categorize it properly.

I will be using slugs on posts. These will replace the old URLs that were jonathancavell.com/wordpress/p=### with more relevant information.

All of these have been carefully chosen to avoid interfering with the content and community that we have already built here. If you find any of them obtrusive, please let me know. It has been humbling and encouraging to see how well this blog has taken off and I certainly don’t want to do anything to mess with the success to this point.